People no longer go online.

They live Online.

How deeply is your brand embedded in the life of your customers?

Companies are undertaking extraordinary efforts, as well as significant investment, to grow brand loyalty, sales and market share. However, a recent study by the Havas Media Group demonstrated that most people would not care if 74% of all brands no longer existed. (That is not a typo—again, most people agree that it would not matter if roughly three-quarters of all brands simply disappeared.)

The Havas study certainly strikes fear into the hearts of many marketers. But how about those brands —26% of them—that certainly would be missed? Their story underscores a new trend in customer relationship marketing that is creating the difference between relevance and a nonchalance about whether a brand continues to exist or not.

"It’s not often in today’s fast-paced marketing scene that somebody describes a concept you immediately know is exactly right – one that resonates with both your instincts and your intellect."

Sebastian Jespersen and Stan Rapp have done this with their vision of entangling the brand in the daily life of customers. They nd fault with today’s lock-step focus on engage- ment when so much more is possible. The battle for “Share of Life” has taken center stage for the behemoths of the online world. Jespersen and Rapp believe that the ght between Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft to reach into every corner of your life is at the heart of what drives the digital economy.

In the business world, one of the greatest compliments is to say: “Gee! I wish I had created that ad! ...thought of that idea! ... conceived that initiative! “ And while the ethos of entangling brand and consumer resonates so perfectly for these times, I could not have come up with such a concept. Nor has any- one else. Discovery of the unique power of an entangled relationship could only have emerged from these two strong thinkers on divergent paths who had the rare ability – together – to frame this exciting new outlook.

Deborah Malone, Founder The Internationalist

“We lived on farms, then we lived in cities and now we're going to live on the internet”